Description

Adeena Karasick

Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations

108 Pages / Poetry

(pbk. $25.95)

ISBN 978-1-956921-12-0, October 5, 2023 (Pre-order pricing through that date)

Marked by a playful “cognitive dissidence” and a lyrically and visually explosive mix of pathos, comedy, and wit, Aerotomania: The Book of Lumenations is Karasick’s 12th volume of poetry. Through a poetics of politically engaged aesthetic resistance, this work negotiates turbulence, loss, nostalgia and hope, inscribing a prescient “present” ever-arriving through jubilation and bereavement, in immanence and irruption.

Book your flight now. The amazing Adeena Karasick–poet, theorist, performance artist–has built a new kabbalistic aircraft that takes readers to newly discovered other worldly and other wordy domains. Text takes flight. Hop on board. The passengers already onboard include Jacques Derrida, Elliot Wolfson, Lauren Bacall, Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Ingeborg Bachmann, Michael Wex, and many more. Seats are still available. “hiding in plane site/sometimes it’s crying out under the weight of its reference/renavigating/from one destination to another/performing its own genealogy,” this is a flight not to be missed. After all, “we are the letters traveling through space and time.”
—Hank Lazer, author of Thinking in Jewish and P I E C E S.

In an Adeena Karasick book, one expects the unexpected–along with delight, amusement, and piercing insights into the workings of language, society, and desire. On Karasick’s quicksilver tongue, Jeremiah’s Lamentations become the Book of Lumenations, songs of mourning shot through and transfigured with corruscating and hopeful light. In the bravura title poem Ærotomania, we are swept up on a round-the-world jet flight where air travel becomes the emblem and fulfillment of all the wordplay and word-work of Jewish mysticism and post-structuralist theory. “The airplane is structured like a language,” and the overbrimming, unstoppable glossalalia of Ærotomania initiates us into a mile-high club of linguistic and philosophical promiscuity–novel, striking, and ever-shifting aerial panoramas of our lives within words.
—Mark Scroggins, author of Damage: Poems 1988-2022 and Zion Offramp 1-50

Punning with conceptual condensations until pleasures become fireworks, joyously singing the language dynamic, displaying heartfelt learning, sexy switch-ups and flights of insight, this work by Adeena Karasick is a gasp-worthy balance of poetic eros, theoretical intelligence, and luminous suspicion. An all-round original book, here the sacred, the playful, the Kabbalah and the female are flying high in polymorphous boldness.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet-critic